Among known employee and workforce management systems used for scheduling and managing personnel are systems designed to support telephone call centers. Such systems typically include a basic planning capability to enable a manager to forecast future call loads and employee requirements to service such loads. Some of these systems provide a scheduling capability which allocates employee work hours according to forecasted staffing requirements. Employees are assigned to fill the schedules and employee assignments are posted.
Conventional forecasting techniques are computationally-efficient, accurate on a macro scale, e.g., month-to-month, and to a limited degree, able to accommodate real-time changes in call volumes over a more dynamic period, e.g., every half hour. However, such forecasting techniques have not accommodated data other than historic data of similar schedule sessions.
Known workforce management systems do not account for the many factors that can influence workload demands and forecasting. Among such factors are weather, traffic, and the stock market. As a result, the forecasting provided by such systems is subject to dramatic workforce shortage and over-supply in the event that an extrinsic event influences a region covered by the company using such a system. Further, workforce management systems in the prior art fail to effectively include dynamic employee preferences in the scheduling process and do not permit an employee to post a proposed change to his or her schedule.
What is needed in the art and has not been available is a scheduling system and method which dynamically incorporates extrinsic data. What is further needed in the art is a system and method which allow employees remote access to receive scheduling information and post proposed changes to the schedule. The present invention satisfies these and other needs.
The present invention provides a system and method for generating schedules at a central location based on information received from a number of distributed sources. The system and method assign the employees to shifts to fill a schedule template while complying with any business and employee constraints that have been specified. Among particular features, the schedules that are generated can accommodate employee preferences such as shift requests, leave requests and shift swapping. In a particularly preferred form, the present invention enables managers to conduct auctions to fill popular shifts and reverse auctions to fill unpopular shifts. The system also can forecast workloads and incorporate the forecast results into the schedule template to generate a more efficient schedule.
In accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, a method for centrally creating a schedule is described for use in connection with a distributed network of the type which includes a host server and at least one first client side machine. In this method, schedule requirements provided by the first client side machine through the distributed network are processed, for example, at the host server. A schedule is then constructed in accordance with the processed schedule requirements. A plurality of extrinsic sources provide further information to the host server through the distributed network. The schedule is revised in accordance with any further information that is received, and the revised schedule is made available to each of the first client side machines that are connected in the distributed network.
In further aspects of this first embodiment, an optimal shift pattern or optimal staffing requirement can be determined for the schedule. In a particularly preferred embodiment, the host server communicates with one or more second client side machines which can provide shift requests to the host server. Any such shift requests from the second client side machines can be accompanied by a bid which is used by the host server to select among multiple shift requests in an auction-like process.
In accordance with another embodiment of the invention, a method for centrally creating a schedule is disclosed for use in a distributed network of the type which includes a host server, a first client side machine, and a plurality of second client side machines. In this method, scheduled requirements are received from the first client side machine through the distributed network and are processed, for example, by the host server. In addition, schedule requirements are received from one or more of the plurality of second client side machines through the distributed network for processing, for example, by the host server. A schedule is constructed in accordance with the processed schedule requirements. The host server receives further information through the distributed network from one or more of the second client side machines and revises the schedule in accordance with any such further information. The revised schedule is then made accessible to the first client side machine as well as one or more of effecting client side machines.
These and other features, embodiments, and aspects the present invention can be appreciated from the following drawing description and detailed description of a preferred embodiment.